Posts Tagged ‘Maple’
Maple, The Untold Story
I use a lot of ash in many of my projects because it is almost as hard as maple, but has a more pronounced grain pattern than maple. Most of the maple I get comes from the New England states, and even though it’s smooth creamy white texture works well as a light contrast to darker woods, it’s just downright boring. There is very little grain pattern which is just not visually stimulating.
However, there are species of maple that are dramatic. Some maple wood contains natural occurrences that are referred to as “figure”. This figure shows up as shimmering, silver streaks throughout the wood and only appears in about 2% of the harvested USA maple. The most common figure appears as lines crossing horizontally across the wood and is referred to as “tiger stripe” or “flame”. Of all the figured maple, this is the most common and fairly easy to find. The second type of figure is “birdseye” which is covered with little dots that look like eyes. Birdseye is not as common and much harder to find, but very beautiful. The third and prettiest maple type is “quilted”. The pattern in this type looks like folds in a quilt and is breathtaking, especially when it contains heavy quilt. This type is very hard to find and too expensive for most of my products.
All figured maple carries a significant price premium over non-figured maple. However, quilted maple usually carries a premium price well above the other figured types and is normally found only in Oregon maple trees.
This lazy susan is an example of this type of figured maple. Notice the horizontal lines running across the maple and through the edges. This picture doesn’t do it justice.
This is one of my bookmarks which contains Birdseye maple.
I have always wanted to jazz up some of my products with quilted maple, but just could not justify the price. This changed when a large shipment of Oregon Big Leaf Maple arrived at my lumber supplier this week. They had pallets of short, cutoff pieces containing a high quilt figure for a very inexpensive price (in relation to normal quilted maple prices). I spent an hour this morning digging through the pallets and found some very dramatic pieces. The board in this picture is 2 1/4″ thick and will be re-sawed into thinner boards. The quilt pattern will become very dramatic when I put an oil-based finish on it. The final finish really brings out the “pop” factor in these type of boards. I’m very excited to finally get this beautiful wood for the first time and anxious to incorporate it into some of my products.
